Where A Witch Goeth

Chapter Thirty-Six: The Jack of Spades

Each time I shadow traveled with Evander, I secretly felt a little ashamed that, as a witch, I found the ride rough. This time, whether from the gin or my emotional state, was the worst. I came unanchored, and I floundered in the dark untethered.

I flailed and fell and cried out. Cried out for Van, of course. Part of me hated myself for needing him, but I did. I needed him for more than this. I needed him a lot and often.

Van's name on my lips converted to a gasp as a force grasped the back of my sturdy sweater and arrested my fall in the dark. I reached out, my hands planting against a solid surface two inches from my nose. 

The floor.

 Then a cool hand that was becoming rapidly familiar and necessary to me slid around my breast to my sternum, and I was righted on my feet.

Still in the pitch dark, I twisted in Van's arms and latched onto him, drowning my shame in his dark, toasty, espresso scent. Me, deciding to run away, had been a fool's errand. Who was I kidding? I didn't make it forty miles before I regretted the distance from him.

"Jesus Christ, Van! you almost lost me in the shadows!" I scolded him when I wanted to scold myself for being so weak, so needy of a man.

But he wasn't just any man, was he? He was a vampire and I was a witch, and our magic was weaving us together in something that was not about either one of us alone.

"No," he soothed, holding me tightly against him as he trailed my spine with calming fingers. "We're just in a large storage room instead of a tight closet. I let you go too quickly, because I didn't think you'd want me holding on, and you didn't have your balance, that's all. I'd never lose you."

He was wrong. One day, he was going to lose me. I was going to disintegrate in his arms, an arrow through my throat.

Unless I could prevent that, too.

Okay, new plan. Save the vampire now, and save us both later.

Er, sooner.

I knew for sure that Van was dead in my own time—my future time. So if I could save him in this time, that meant I could effect change in the past, right? If I succeded here, I would just do it again, farther back.

Maybe I could prevent Van from becoming a vampire altogether. And if he weren't a vampire, then I wouldn't need to feed him and he wouldn't need to refeed me and the whole Morgan-arrow issue would be rendered moot. Maybe I'd simply go back there, and change things, and we'd live out our human lives in the eighteenth century. Well, I'd be a witch, but Van would be human, and we'd be happy and grow old together.

In a wilderness, without electricity or a bathroom.

But that didn't matter, right?

Maybe you could toughen up for frontier life, my inner witch said cynically. But the jury is still out on whether you can change anything at all.

Shut up, witch, I told her. We are meant to be, Evander and me. Our time together in this place wasn't supposed to happen, and yet it has. It's a second chance.

A chance to change the future and the past.

A chance for a happy ever after and before.

"Celie?" Van sounded uncertain. I was still holding on to him for dear life.

"I love you," I admitted.

I said it blind, in total darkness. I said it softly, gripping his granite strength. I said it shaking with fear, but wild with hope.